Don't Welcome These New Neighbours

The last person that you want to move into the house next door is this guy. It is even worse if he takes to sunbathing on your back fence!!!

Sure, baby raccoons are cute but they are also very very destructive. And when you see one baby raccoon, you know that a whole family is close by.

Dan came home at lunch and found this guy being chased out of our neighbour's yard, so he set up shop on our fence. His sibbling was trapped between the compost bin and our fence. Dan went back to work and was surprised to find they hadn't moved in 4 hours. We had to make them feel unwelcome or they would take over, so we pulled out the garden house and sprayed them away. It worked. This guy moved over one more yard and sat there. Later that night, I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye. We turned on the light and saw a big mamma raccoon with SEVEN babies on our neighbour's garage roof. They were on a rescue mission to fetch the two that had camped out in our yard all day. Just to make sure that all eight of them felt very unwelcome, we got the hose out again for a late night shower. They got the message and ran.

I know that a family of raccons live in the attic of our near neighbours - about 4 houses down. They love garbage night and all come out to sample the Montrose buffet. We put our garbage out in the morning, but most of our neighbours have a garbage phobia and insist on setting it curbside at the earliest possible moment: 6 p.m. in winter and 7 p.m. in the summer. It's like putting out raccoon bait! But I doubt that I can change their behaviour. They love to hose their sidewalks down daily and they love to put the garbage out early. What can I do? So for now, I put hot sauce on the back fence, to keep the raccoons remembering that they are definitely not welcome at my money pit.